Slashdot Mirror
Metaverse Launched?
jlouderb writes "Following in the heels of Worlds Inc. Blaxxun Interactive and Linden Labs, super-stealth project There Inc. launches Wednesday at CES. ExtremeTech has a preview of the world up,
which is characterized by expressive avatars that look like idealized humans. Backed by a long list of notables, including Halsey Minor, Trip Hawkins, Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rosetto, it's
an ambitious effort. But will the target market of Wal-Mart moms show up? Who knows, we all
laughed at AOL too. You can sign up for the public beta and find out for
yourself."
Sounds exactly like Sims Online to me, and they already have an established brand.
I mean honestly, I just don't get it.... If you want to go out and meet people and have fun... Then get up, go outside, and go have fun!
Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow...
It must be one of those new slashdot story advertisements.
And we still do. Have they taken over the world and I haven't noticed, or is there some other sinister reason to stop laughing at them?
So... it's just like a MMORPG, except when some kid pisses you off, you can't murder him?
$8.95/mo web hosting
So, what, we can't make ones that look like us in real life?
Shooting daggers and a very Mario-like floating heart convey deeper emotions.
"Deeper" being a relative term... How many times in one day do you wink at someone?
There expects its audience to skew more towards women than men, at least at first. Why? Well according to CEO Tom Melcher, "men will go where the women are, but the reverse isn't true."
The logic there doesn't quite work. Why not just say "The company behind There has figured out what drinking establishments have known for several hundred years"?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
You can even customize your Avatar by visiting a Spa for a "facial", although we didn't get a chance to try that out.
Sooner or later, these MMORPGs will saturate the market. It'll be interesting the first time one of them folds.
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
I'm really not impressed with the idea. The tech, yes, the detail, yes, but honestly what is the point of this except a few gewgaws tossed onto a virtual chatroom?
Yeah, text chatting may not have motorbikes, but it's a lot simpler, and when the day is done, simplicity is important when you have things to get done (like chatting about whatever).
And the extras like the stores, etc. seem pointless to the core experience as well as making it more complex.
I'm sure that someday VR-type chats may well exist and even be useful. But I don't think this is going to be it.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Thanks for the offer guys, but I'll keep not buying Nike in the real world ;-)
In Stephenson's metaverse, the "cool" people were the best programmers, they always had the coolest stuff. If someone creates an open world that allows people to use the system to build/program their own things (buildings/vehicles/etc...) inside the world (think MUSH/MUD with graphics) then we are getting closer.
The next step would be more VR, an immersive interface, etc...
But it has to start somewhere. Although (slashdot appeal to the choir) it seems like the metaverse of Snow Crash was more of a *open* thing.
> What is this story about?
If you look at the front page, you'll see a lot of so-called "links" for this story. Click on them, and you get more information! It's amazing what technology can do.
Yes, actually reading the damn thing could be quicker than posting and waiting for someone less lazy to reply...
"Because There focuses on non-tech geeks, and because communication and chatting forms the core of the world, the company limits you to normal, human looking avatars. "
The strength of the Metaverse in Snowcrash was the ability to program everything and everything.... it was basically a GIANT graphical MUSE (not a mud), where EVERYONE is a developer.
-Berj
separate the average Josephine/Joe from her/his money.
- Age
- How did you hear about us ?
- Do you make friends online, play games ?
- Run a JavaScript Hardware checker (fat chance)
- Or Fill in details (Operating system, processor speed, RAM)
- Video Card
.. (hmm - I run Linux Thin Client), connection speed
- Name, email, address, we may mail you a CD
AbortAndy Rabagliati
The WEB3D cultists just won't give up. I guess that's a good thing. Don't get too excited until there is a great porn 3d site, metaverse is a few years after that...
One of the things that made the metaverse(tm) so cool of an idea was the dynamic nature of the place. People had the ability to create thier own environments, assuming you "owned property" in the metaverse, and create objects as well.
...thats how I envisioned it anyway.
A true implementation of the metaverse would allow me to model my own home, in my own space, on my own server, allow people to visit it AND allow me to program objects in that space that other people could see. For example a program, that takes the shape of a radio, that when another user get within range of it, they download the part of the app that they need, that I wrote, such that they can then hear the music from the radio (streaming mp3's, ect).
And at first I'm sure the place would be mainly populated by programmer and techy types, eager to see what they can code, and how they can push the technology. But I would assume, just like in the www, that as the software gets fleshed out the masses will come, and they will have an already existing base of freeware objects and models to pick and choose from, as well as commercial products.
Of course there would be security problems that would have to be overcome, and different systems to be compatable with, plus a streaming model format. But I think that with a combination of something like java and open source clients and servers, the only parts that would need to be "official" would be the hooks for the in game software, and some kind of central property authority to keep track of how different properties (individual servers) interconnect and where they exist on the x/y plane of the the metaverse.
THEN there is the whole bandwidth issue, I don't think this would work very well on the current crop of cable and dsl modems. but hey, the www as we know it know it today wouldn't exist unless people before had pushed the bounderies of technology.
Sure, it may look a tad corny now, but with it being open ended and allowing people to develop their own worlds I think I may be an early adopter of this stuff.
:p
I'd really dig a whole snow-crash-ish house, and who ever builds the first "Black Sun" will be instantly cool with the other geeks using this setup.
I don't see if they charge for the service or not, but if they don't I imagine a lot of people will check this out.
I can't wait for someone to build a slashdot world and I can slap the shit out of CmdrTaco myself
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
It's been tried so many times before, and has never been met with more than a cursory glance from the public at large. These companies need to realize that you need something compelling in your virtual world; furthermore, it needs to be compelling enough to get around the 3D nature of the place.
Anyone remember the Magic Desk system for early handhelds? It was organized like a room in a house. You walked out the door, went to the library to get a book, etc. It sucked because you had to virtually 'walk' to each location, which was totally unnecessary. How about those 3D window managers? Giant pain in the ass, total form without function (and this from a Mac geek).
3D is great for spatial orientation and tasty graphics, but as we all know here it actually hinders you as an interface (compared to our perfectly-suited 2D metaphor for our 2D screens and input devices).
The Sims Online offers a fairly rich 2.5D world that gives you a reason to go - it's a game, and you can chat, wander around, shop, etc. Add the customization bit and it's the only real Metaverse going, IMHO.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
For all of you who think this is a new thing, Blaxxun's been doing it for years with their atrociously clunky, sanitized Cybertown, which allowed creation and sale of furniture and other objects used to customize hideously-unlivable, 10-polygon homes and served as basically a chat room for slumming soccer moms and toadying males in it for the girls.
Extreme Palace chat 3D. How is this revolutionary?
Let's be frank ... women LOVE to chat. I don't mean to be sexist here, but it is the truth. However, many women are VERY self-concious of their appearence ... so many of them will stay home instead of "going out", as others who have posted before me suggested. This will give an arena to those people who feel "ugly", or that have a hard time going out, or that live in the middle of no-where (or in a dead town) to virtuall go out and chat with people. This can be good in that it is better that people, in general, interact with people instead of turning into isolationists ... it isn't healthy ...
.... this type of virtual reality world isn't healthy either. It allows people to make themselves look any way they want to "look" without any of the hard work. It also could make real interperson communication more difficult for people since they will rely on a sim like this as a crutch. But most importantly, a sim like this will allow people to settle for the status-quo instead of actually doing something to improve themselves. Since people won't see the real them online, they feel less and less inclined to take care of themselves both from a health and an appearance aspect.
... compaired to that of men), which in turn will draw men to it ... but at a great cost to socity as a whole. This game could possibly become a sociological disaster in that the game encourages VERY unhealthy behaviour for long periods of time. Games like this can actually ruin people's lives ... just ask some of the EverQuest junkies from around the world.
....
HOWEVER,
The bottom line of all this rambling: This company COULD make quite a killing since this game will obviously appeal to the market of women (a market that is realatively untapped in the computer world
(* prepares to dodge all of the fireballs and weapons that will be thrown my way from those junkies *)
Just my $0.02 cents
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
Wow. This is the very first time I've had to say, it sucks having a Radeon VE card. I filled out the survey, and was told that that invite people in waves, and I'd hear back from them. So, I go looking some more into the site documentation and find that the ATI Radeon series of graphics cards is completely supported... EXCEPT the Radeon VE and 7000.
I don't do 3d gaming. But I do super-high resolution (1920x1200 32bit) display, video playback (mpeg2 decoding functions built in), and some TV output with my video card. (It isn't a 3d screamer, but it is a decent card. AGP 4x, too.) It has been so many years that I've been excluded from something by my video card that I forgot how exclusionary some of these online environments and 3d games are.
It's all about chatting, not about gaming. And chatting has already to be proven a very popular pastime, even with people who don't use the Internet a lot otherwise.
And they got one thing right: "Well that was certainly fun. The most interesting aspect of the avatar chat mode is the way words are communicated. Instead of opening a chat window underneath the main screen, There uses cartoon style bubbles that pop up above the avatar's head. There claims that this keeps your eye more on the avatar, and the facial expressions, rather than just turning the entire experience into a text chat.". Guess how almost all MMORPGs have implemented speech. With a g..damned IRC-like interface which makes all conversation a rather impersonal affair!
Except one... Ultima Online, like "There" also floats the speech text over the avatars, and I must say it works very well. Being able to see your partners, and to see quickly who says what, makes it very easy to converse with others in that game. I even have had a business meeting with three colleagues in Ultima Online, as an experiment. Our alternatives were ICQ, E-mail, IRC or a conference call. Meeting "face to face" in-game was by far the most effective of these options.
"There" may well be a success, if properly marketed. If they have any brains they'll try and hook up with big ISPs like AOL and the like, and have them distribute the software with those free CDs we all know and love. They do, as someone pointed out, face competition from the Sims. The Sims is different but they aim at the same market segment.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Since you didn't finished the article:
"Build Your Own World: The entire world is also up for grabs. There expects to release an open API for C++ developers, along with the ability to use Flash, and their own ThereScript language (based on the open-source Lua language) to create separate worlds. There expects that this will allow almost anyone to create their own massively multiplayer game, without having to reinvent the coding wheel for each world."
another ad? i dont think its good when most of the people are making negative reviews, why advertise on slashdot if no one likes the product?
i havent even tried the sims online, but i know it sux. avatar chat was old when theparty was around and everyone had 900 images of tiny aliens stuck to them when they were all 56k....
i'll stick to irc and being stared at in the mall, thank you.
And the graphics are even worse.
---
I support spreading santorum
it doesn't hurt a byte?
just try & not get stuck in the fraudulent stock markup payper liesense FUDgePits of Debt(tm).
look for va.msn.net, ticker: (VAST)?
tell 'em robbIE. wIEnIE bouys, sheesh.
It's pretty cool. They've got a winamp plugin, too.
The Developer info page on their site...
Once approved, you pay a one-time initial set up cost to start the process for your item. You can then either buy a quantity of the item or put one copy of the item up for perpetual auction. In addition to the set up charge, you pay the per-unit cost for each product you either buy or sell at auction. If you choose to sell the product via perpetual auction, one copy of the product will be put up for auction at a specific price. When someone buys the product, the buyer will receive the product and the money will be taken from their account and credited to your account automatically. Then another auction will be created so that someone else may buy another product. This auction will stay in place until either you remove it or until the quantity limit you originally set is reached.
I don't think that's exactly what Stephenson had in mind, and that's not what the Metaverse is about. It looks like, in There you can code trinkets, not "the entire world" as the article suggests.
-Berj
How many girls do you know with NVidia cards, or the desire to go out and buy and NVidia card? That market you're talking about is using laptops from work, or a cheapie Gateway. They aren't going to be rushing out to buy and install NVidia's any time soon. Besides, someone already invented the way that market "chats." It's called the phone. -dave
The book describes in detail that while some people hang out and expand the Metaverse with their own code, most teenage girls are happy to go to Wal-Mart and buy an avatar in one of three pre-packaged breast sizes; "improbable", "impossible", and "ludicruous".
I know one, but I keep her locked up in the house coding away and only let her out once a day to tan.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
The Metaverse was a VR experience described in the excellent cyberpunk comedy
Snowcrash by Neil Stephenson, the same guy who wrote Cryptonomicon.
In the described virtual world, there was a virtual bar that was highly exclusive, and everyone wanted to hang out there. It was named the Black Sun.[*]
Just as 2001 served as an inspiration for developing communication satellites, Snowcrash's "metaverse" served as the inspiration for the development of VRML. The first company to try and make a VRML world into a commercial venture was, not surprisingly, named "Blaxxun Interactive" in honor of the bar in Stephanson's book.
[*] The protagonist of the story, Hiro Protagonist, was a pizza delivery guy/hacker who wrote the code for much of the metaverse, including the Black Sun bar.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
If you read the little developers part, you can also skin and model objects for use in the game... and sell them. You can use any paint app for skins, and GMax (3D Studio Max lite) for low poly models. For modelers on the unemployed side of things *ahem* this could be a source of side income. Looks interesting enough for me to try the public beta.
Okay, so at first glance this seems like just another chat room/MMORPG/Palace rip-off, with maybe slightly better graphics. But then I started reading into it some more, and I started getting impressed. They're planning to release open API's, anyone can create their own objects and sell/share them, create new parts of There for themselves and other.. once you start doing that, the 'Metaverse' moniker starts to stick. Right now it's cute and sanitized and controlled. But once those API's open up, well.. look what happened to the web. Sure, 90% of it is sanitized commercial crap (or pr0n), but there's all these pockets of individuality flowering through here and there that keep me coming back with a hint of the old promise that first got me hooked during the days that BBS's were cutting edge.
Err.. back to the topic on hand: The exciting thing about this, and what sets it apart from pretty much every other MMORPG/virtual chat out there is that ability to create new parts of the world and have them accessible to others. As people log on and start making that world their own, that's when things get interesting, that's when the whole 'Metaverse' concept starts taking hold. This is the only concept like this I've seen that holds any promise of becoming even partially what we all imagine the 'Metaverse' to be.
As a side note, take a good look at the people who are backing this project. It reads like a who's who of online and gaming celebs in a way. It makes me curious to see how this develops, as I find it hard to believe so many of them would back it to the tune of $33 million if they didn't see a heckuva lot more potential in this than just another virtual chat room.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
Again, not quite right. Although the Snow Crash Metaverse allowed programmers to pretty much create any avatar they liked, there were still boundarys. For example the limit on height of hair stlyes in the Black Sun.
boy are those graphics cheesy. I'll wait a couple years for it to mature. Until then sims and ps2 are more compelling.
I haven't read Stephensen book yet, and while I'd imagine the movie Johnny Mnemonic has some very polarized reviews, I really thought the depection of the "internet" in that was very interesting from a metaverse sort of view...
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that is where There is heading. my brother is one of their lead engineers and this thing has been under wraps for over 4 years with some of the best minds in the industry hammering it out, making it scalable and extensible... it's the framework for something very.. very... different, than anything else done so far (including simsonline).
La via sola al paradiso incommincia nel inferno
I thought There didn't encourage player killing.
Yes you could be the owner of a sherman tank for only 750,000. Please pick your spawn point.
I won't buy unless there are swordfights.
Get ten to twenty "avatars" and sit them around a virtual conference room table. Now have them start "talking" and all of these baloons start popping up. First off, can you see all of them? If you're on one side of the table how do you see the balloons of the people on your side while watching for balloons of people on the other side?
Great, now who's the poor soul who has to type the transcript of this whole meeting. How are they making sure they get things in the right chronological order. (Certain comments won't make any sense unless they follow the comment they were built upon.)
This sounds like a usable interface for 2 or 3 people working together, but it'll break down real quick as the numbers increase.
(Also, one of the joys of IRC was that you could go AFK to take care of something quickly and then go back and read the 'conversation' that happened while you were out.)
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
...and there's no there There?
No. Why?
Here's why.
and iChat as well, with the bubble thing.
I want 2D games back.
Think about it, you could have your computer host your house/construct. We'd either need a few central servers to hold the overall landscape or just hobbyists.
Beyond that commercial concerns could setup "real estate" and rent out space for buildings and stuff if you wanted real persistence when your machine is off.
Whoops, I think I've just described another set of web servers and a new browser. Maybe we should work with the Mozilla people...
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Trip Hawkins is the kiss of death for any project, it seems. Sure, he had a couple good ideas... but in the last 10 - 15 years, anything he got involved with went south.
Not saying it's anything he's done, just that the gods don't like him or something.
It's a nice day outside.
This update has been brought to you by the what-is-that-bright-yellow-round-thing-that-hurts
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
As an example, consider the description of a virtual sword fight[*] in the Black Sun. Before going into the actual fight, there's about a one page aside where Stephanson says that kendo is an attempt to take a chaotic and violent practice - sword combat - and give it rules and regulations. Stephanson then goes back to describing the fight. In this description Stephanson talks about how the opponent, a very formal Japanese businessman, faces faces off with Hiro and moves forward
displaying perfect zanshin. He then explains that
That's not an actual quote (i.e. it is from memory) but you get the jist. The description of the method of movement is just what a kendo person would do. The terminology explains to the swordplay nerd that the businessman has years of practice, so much so that he moves effortlessly without conscious thought. Saying he has "zanshin" gives the swordplay nerd the idea that this person could move through an entire fight without even thinking about what he was doing, that the businessman could simply watch Hiro's actions and let his body respond to them without any conscious effort.
All that implied level of skill is lost on the non-swordplay nerd because they don't know what zanshin is. However, they still laugh because of his description of a highly trained martial artist getting cut off below the knees because their sport doesn't teach them how to block down there.
Stephenson is a master at doing this; i.e. he can tell a good story containing inside jokes and still have 80% of the people who are outsiders laughing. That's far preferable to Mark Fabi's approach of telling a good story full of inside jokes and then stopping the story to explain the joke to the outsider, thus destroying both the inside-ness of the joke and the flow of the story.
[*] The character Hiro protagonist always carried a katana and shoto, both in real life and as an avatar in the metaverse.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Oh, well, back in the day AW was a non-paying service. I even payed some time for support, but now it's completely paying and I just don't care anymore. My friends there have left anyway.
I've already signed up for the beta :-)
MUSEs (and MUDs too, I'm sure) had Zones - a global zone, which set the rules and commands for the world, and various zones (within zones) inside it. They could be defined in such a way that certain rules are ALWAYS in place, and certain rules can be overwritten.... For instance, my house could have low gravity :)
It just bothers me that this commercial product was compared to the Metaverse described in the book.
-Berj
Like furtive and grubby sessions of mutual masturbation between middle-aged housewives and overweight, pubescent 14 year old boys. Frankly, if I had a kid, I would see this scenario as healthier then catching him pounding-the-pudd to hentai. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with spanking it to the rape of a crap-covered 13 year old schoolgirl buy a ninja octopus demon.
A few months ago I started getting back into caring about my appearance. I've begun dressing up more often, and not because I need to, but because I want to. I exercise. I go outside and live more.
And you know what? It's great. People respect you more when you look good. Sometimes they even fear you. Could be my smooth, shaved head and red tinted glasses, though. YMMV
However, I think that I'm an extreme case. I think the whole chat thing for the general populace was "in" for a period in the nineties, but it's passed by now. People want functionality and usability, not extraneous features. I work at a school district that has a large emphasis on technology in the curriculum. The teachers here certainly wouldn't use this. The students don't chat online with each other a bunch here, or at home. I know because I talk with the more technically inclined ones daily. You know what they do when they aren't here? It isn't being online all the time. I believe people in general are going outside more. I just don't see this going anywhere. This seems like a game that has no point, just like EQ.
Wait a minute...EQ...maybe it will go somewhere.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
Geez , Common people . Last time i checked we live in a real world . Why try to invent the world we ALREADY live in all over again . I can understand games like quake , unreal , or even everquest . But this crap is obsurd . I can just see the advertisements for it now " Are you sick of your day to day stress ... If so pay us money and we will give you virtual stress . Now virtual boss can chew you out in the same day as your real one " Lame lame lame . I think these people that would wanna do this oughta have their computer rights taken away for a year and have to attend mandatory socialization on friday nights .
Their economy sounds like project Entropia to me... granted, users can create and sell items as well, but it looks like the company's going to be making tons of (real) money selling Therebucks.
-Berj
Simple solution is to use LambdaMOO. I have used it for about 10 years now and the pure text interface is still very usable.
There are many women in there, many with rather interesting descriptions so the women appeal factor is in evidence. It is free too.
One article some time ago revealed that many regulars in chatrooms were women, logged in from work, keeping the text window hidden when needed, bringing it up when able to. And a text window is not suspicious, a huge multi coloured moving image window is a different matter.
Sex. Well, can't forget that on SlashDot. Plenty of that on LambdaMOO too. Used to be a lot of BDSM but that has dropped off lately. Some still have outrageous descriptions, regulars will know who I mean. And no, I cannot describe eir, the moderators would blow a fuse. It still scorches my screen whenever I see that particular guest.
Thus it appears there is a lot of netsex from work, perhaps that explains why paperwork takes so long time...
All in all you already have what you need. Question still remains: what more can this actually bring its users?
Why is it that people create these virtual worlds that contain the same limitations as the real world. The idea of money only makes sense when you have scarcity. Guess what, this is cyberspace: there is no scarcity necessary here. And yet people build it into their worlds as a "feature".
What I would really find interesting to see is how such a world would look like when there is no scarcity. How would population centers look (usually city center means $$$).
An interesting quote I found in this Wired article:
These little economies raise big questions, therefore, and by no coincidence, they tend to be the big questions of the economic age. How, for instance, do we assign value to immaterial goods? What defines ownership when property becomes as fluid as thought? What defines productivity when work becomes a game and games become work?
Are we so used to the notion of scarcity that we wish to reproduce it in cyberspace? Would we not rather move beyond this idea?
Another interesting aspect to think about is how copyrights relate to this. Say I write a piece of code that represents my design for a Castle in such a virtual world. If I copyright it nobody else can legally build the same castle as me. And so the idea of scarcity is reintroduced. But it is only relevant as long as there is no rich public domain from which people can retrieve equivalent items. So hopefully there would be tons of castles available under a Creative Commons license.
Halsey Minor, Trip Hawkins, Jane Metcalfe and Louis Rosetto... are "notable"? With that list of posers, burnouts, con men, and also-rans, you know you can safely ignore this for what it is - pure media hype.
Someone stop them before we get another torrent of empty-headed buzzword-filled "articles" describing how this nth attempt at a failed idea (god, how is Blaxxun even still around?) is now suddenly going to "change the world"...
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Isn't that supposed to be Ultima Online? I love well-researched articles.
The Developer section on There's existing site is not the same as the future API that they will release to allow for creating interactive objects and "worlds".
Now, you can create new 3D objects or skin existing objects. In the future, you will be able to use the API to create more complex objects and places.
Freality Metaverse Construction is at:
freality.com/warez.html
it's also a SourceForge project, at:
fmc.sf.net
It's not a contender at the Blaxxun level yet, but then again, we don't get millions of dollars for development. But of course, capital makes its own requirements.
The goal is to have an Open and Free Metaverse in Java3D that everyone can use and modify. The content will focus mainly on exploration, gaming and Sims-esque chat.
So far there is a simple solar system model which will soon be somewhat similar to what Celestia has done (it's a rad app.. check it at: http://shatters.net/celestia).
We hope to extend beyond Celestia by having live query access to the big astronomical databases.. so the solar system sim will become a universe sim, and you'll have live access to the best astro datasets around.
Turning earthward, we'll integrate GIS databases and city models from places like the USGS, vterrain.org, and openplans.org.
We also hope to integrate datasets from the lifesciences, yielding simulations of all of the Earth's ecologies, all in 3D, as accurately as possible.
The obvious problem with all of this is scale. The astronomical datasets alone are sometimes in the terabytes. Well, I've worked with some GB datasets before, and have access to a 300TB dataset, so I'm not too scared by this prospect, but the project will take some time to "get interesting".
Another problem is choosing the right architecture. We've opted for Java 3D in lieu of X3D, which if it could get off the ground would be the best choice. We'll see how X3D pans out.
If you'd like to discuss dev, post to the sourceforge page or mail me. pablo@freality.com
Cheers!
How many "WalMart Moms" have systems of this caliber? I know most of my non-tech friends have machines that are less powerfull than this. They have never seen a need to upgrade their machines because they do everything they need just fine. You can (text) chat on AIM (or Yahoo or wherever) with a Pentium II 300 if that's what you've got.
And even for the people with newer machines, how many of the "cheap" home systems come with Radeon's or GForce's??? A quick check on Dell.com and Gateway.com shows that those are optional video cards; so how many non-techies changed that option when they decided that "dude, I'm gettin' a Dell"?.
Just my $0.02, but I think they might not have the potential audience they want just from their machine requirements.
The biggest part of the Metaverse was that when people spoke it was a voice and their face matched that voice.
Those who would like to create a virtual world in the image of Neal Stephenson's Metaverse would need to create something that is more like a pure geographical namespace than the entire world pictured here.
In the book, the featureless metaverse which was first populated by early-adopters was like a database for users to know what is close to them and which/how many of these objects to access based on what the hardware of the day allows.
Ownership of something like the Black Sun implies fair market rates (tiny at first up to substantial by the time the book takes place) for this virtual real estate, then equivalent land rights thereafter.
The company that owns the geographic-relational database should have no hosting control over the "Black Sun" that could let them, say, put a Nike logo on the door. Rather, land ownership would be more like today's domains, and coding and hosting these objects would be like today's web sites - either done personally by Geeks or commercially by third party systems like Geocities.
If my internet experience becomes a visit to this geographic namespace beginning in my *own* office, then I'll be happy to consider Neal Stepheson's vision realized and a new kind of usefulness and relevance brought to virtual existance.
Can I be the avatar Hiro Protagonist?
Watch out for fuzzy snowy screens!
Ah, another year, another virtual chat universe... Do people ever study the reasons why these things fail before giving $33 Million to the next one? Some immediate problems:
* Unstable Economy - with so much money, couldn't they hire an economist? The economy in this thing is like a bad version of "former soviet Russia" - there is no connection between the price of an item and the manufacturing cost. It is like EverQuest - a +1 sword costs the same to make as a +50 sword, so the company has to constantly interfere with the price of an item, create artificial scarcity, etc. At least they have auctions...
* Wasted Graphics - they say they are going after women and emotion, but then they talk about graphics, interaction, etc. First off, the graphics are better, but not enough to make a difference. The interaction (driving around, etc.) is fun for a game but has nothing social about it. If you look at all of the various avatar chat products released over the years, after the initial excitement wears off, people just make the graphics window as small as possible or turn it off completely and focus on the text. It isn't because the graphics were bad - it is just that they are not necessary. The only reason these companies keep going back to graphics is that it makes your $33 Million price tag seem more justified.
* Immersion factor - one of the reasons that IM has trumped all of the other chat products is that it does not require immersion!! Hello, you can do it while doing something else, or chat with multiple people at the same time. IM integrates into your life, instead of forcing you into its world.
Nowadays, online social interaction is pretty well studied. The people with the checkbooks should read some of those studies.
- davevr
It seems that the solution to the bandwidth problem is to have some kind of 3D markup language that can degrade gracefully, in essentially the way HTML works today. Don't have a GeForce10e32 ? You get lower quality versions of the textures, simpler polygons, etc.
The only issue is how much bandwidth is required to receive a minimal scene--and that might well be above what we have right now. Has anyone actually tried to implement such a thing, or at least gotten the preliminaries done so we have some data to work with?
It also seems like a true Metaverse (ala Stephenson) would require a better interface than we have right now. I doubt the general public is going to go for a world where they have to type to speak all day; some kind of voice system is necessary (perhaps incorporating something like Rojer Wilco would help, but most VoIP solutions today are a bit raw...) Plus some of those goggles Hiro wears in Snow Crash would be pretty nice ;)
I like the idea of a property server--it sounds a lot like DNS today, and it could be distributed across multiple servers in the same way; you'd do a lookup of the coordinates, and get an IP back. If the IP's down, it would appear as a fenced in "default" property, otherwise you'd connect to their server, and grab their object information.
Anyway, I've babbled enough. The point is, I think that with a proper 3D language, we really could implement something like this today, though it might be slow as hell for a while, and only really be useful on large LANs (colleges, anyone?).
Wouldn't this be more aptly (and hilariously) named the subverse?
-- jbl
AOL is undoubtedly a large company, but one of the more salient criterions used to assess the health and the future prospects of a company is its ability to grow. Last I read, AOL is faltering a bit in this area.
They got ripped off. They could have licensed the Doom3 engine for less. It looks like Playstation one graphics. When are these people going to realize joe public wont buy into something like this until it looks "real" like TV or at least toy story?
To support billions of users and billions of objects (house...), a Metaverse should be based on a peer-to-peer architecture.
:
Users have to create freely their objects, so a Metaverse should be an open-source project.
And to be really fun, a Metaverse should not require to pay to be in the world.
Just have a look at this academic article
http://gwendal.simon.free.fr/resh02.pdf
You remind me of my foes list.
Merge? Are you completely insane? Imagine hordes of n00bs running around 'nading bewildered housewifes while screaming: "Enemy sub spotted!". Utter carnage, I tell you. Come to think of it, having a dune-buggy with a MG42-softmount would be "a cool thing®"...
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
Now we have another way to waste away in front of our machines untill we starve to death or we can't pay our ISP bill due to spending every last minnute in front of these g**damn online games.
I don't expect the slashdot crowd to fully understand business on that scale, given how you're surrounded by tiny companies that can't make a profit because of their lame business models, but do try to keep up, OK?
Are they using a java client or a web front end? I filled out the public-beta survey and still got no answer. The only options for OS were windows and MacOS, but they had an "other" field. I'm using linux and just wonder if it will be supported by the client piece.
OpenVerse has done this for years. You can have an avatar of any gif, and the rooms can be different backgrounds. You can goto different countries. Bubbles popup when people speak, or you can have a text based chat. But in openverse you cant walk, but you can move. This doesnt stop me from siging up for this.
http://phreakinb.com
The point of There, technically, is that it's supposed to scale up to planetary size. One big, seamless world. No "shards". No picking a server.
It's extensible in several ways; you can repaint objects with Photoshop, design new ones with gmax, and add new play with C++. There's some editorial control, to prevent the world from going downhill.
I'm a bit disappointed that There supports dialup. Supporting dialup forces a whole range of design decisions, all of which make the world worse. Broadband penetration is high enough today that broadband-only is commercially feasible. Half of all online people time is on broadband; the heavy users have already migrated.
I have absolutely no idea whether this will work as a business. Or whether it will work as a virtual world, which is even harder.
It's a nice day outside.
Obviously you're not Canadian. It's winter here. No day is a nice day. Perhaps some are slightly less nasty...
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
This company/game might have to deal with the same thing the Sims Online might hit: what happens when enough people develop "real" relationships only to find out that IRL their friend is not the sex they present online.
I've been waiting for a Sims Online ad for that: Sims character bustles around, then heads out the exit door, a swirl of colors, and suddenly the real person appears and is the opposite sex of their online character.
Will this intrigue or disgust the mainstream audience?
Queens of the Stone Age - they rule
The biggest problem There will have is the system requirements. "System requirements are pretty steep ? you'll need an 800mhz processor, and an OpenGL capable ATI Radeon or nVidia GeForce or NForce graphics card. As you can imagine, the pre-beta was not very stable, but the beta world should be much more reliable." I think most of the people that "chat" online as a primary activity are those that don't buy a new cutting edge system every two years. Most of the people I know who aren't "geeks" and even a lot of the geeks are still running 500 MHz systems with built in video or generic video cards. There is no way that people will really use this if they have to buy a new system just to run it.
bkr
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
they've already perfected it with this little device..
http://www.fu-fme.com
God is Good. Slashdot is not that high .
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
one element that is normally present in an MMORPG, and which is EXTREMELY popular, is the ability to not just be "somebody" else, but also to be "something" else.
The article touches on the ability to "create" content, and also mentions that only humans and pets will be present. ok, fine.
But what about DEVELOPING your avatar? will changing hoverboard colors and clothing styles be enough "growth" for long periods of real time? Or will people simply get bored with it and return to pure text-chat hell?...
Im not suggesting that There (btw - i hate the name. using "There" in a sentence as a Proper Noun is ANNOYING!) center the entire idea around skills trees and character growth, but it WOULD attract more folks. The Wal-mart Mom's wont be enough to support the business, so gamers and such need SOMETHING more added to be drawn in.
Example: In EQ, when i DO actually go on to "just chat", it's MUCH more rewarding and justifiable to me when i sit there Fletching (creating bows and arrows for those of you who have a life...) while i chat. I get a RETURN on my investment of TIME, which keeps me online longer... I am also REWARDED for spending more time online.
This is perhaps the #1 issue and is constantly being discussed by developers of MMORPG's... they know they need to REWARD the user in some way for their investment. They need to give players a sense of accomplishment. SOMETHING TO STRIVE FOR!
In THERE (uhg!), it will simply get flat and boring... and if i wanted that kind of boredom, id just download IM... new emoticons? woohoo! lol..uhg.
just my opinion, i could be wrong...
-vanguard
"I think, therefore I get paid."
MMORPGs, such as EverQuest, as well as various shades of these VR chat worlds all have one missing element in common: There is no easy way for Avatars to record or share information while in the world.
The simple expedient of a notebook (basically a popup window that you can type text into - which then gets saved onto your harddrive where you specify) would go far.
Furthermore, I would love to see the ability to make all kinds of media available through the VR world - documents, pictures, sounds/music etc...
Couple this with the ability to design the layout of your space and build virtual libraries/galleries for sharing these things when you are not online - and I think you would have a winner. I definitely would pay money for a well made intuitive system along these lines.
A real community needs history, culture and more forms of interaction than the limited chat buffer window of the current offerings. These additional forms of interaction have to be made persistent in order for them to have a more lasting impact than the fleeting chat messages.
but I don't want to pay. They shall not have the monopoly on metaspace. Open source can do it :)
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I worked at SGI, then Cosmo, back in the day when VRML was going to revolutionize the web. Cosmo Player was going to be the 3D equivalent to Mosaic for the 3DWeb... BAH!
We bought a small Russian company called Paragraph for some ungodly high amount that had some 3D chat environments. We had clients like Sony, we had $20MM from SGI to make the company stand on its own (it was after all a spin off of OpenGL technology that SGI had developed, except it was SGI's attempt at testing the waters of PC software), and it died a miserable death. granted part of the issues back then were related to the fact that no one had the computer horse power to spin 30MM filtered, lit, and textured triangles, Cosmo was built on OpenGL which M$ was doing it's best to kill with D3D/Farenheight, and the plug in was like 14MB to download, oh, and no one had broadband. Other than those few things, I'm SURE that VRML would have been a raging hit...
There has been so many attempts at this stupid idea that's it's not even funny.
If chat is the application, there's no need for 3D AT ALL. Period. The people that are drawn to chat are generally clueless about how to navigate a 3D world. I've done the focus groups. It funny as hell to watch Joe Six Pack staring at his avatars feet all day because he can't figure out how to navigate a general 3D environment with a 2D input device.
If 3D is what people want, fucking buy Quake x, Half-life, etc.
I never understood the stupidity of people that were willing to shovel buckets of money into this crap when if 3D chat was truly compelling, then all you have to do is whip out a Quake mod!
At least under a Quake Mod then we could get a little closer to the idea of the Metaverse where people are free to develop their own reality.
At least then you can shove a rocket up some lame ass looser when he pisses you off.
Maybe I can find some suckers to give me a few MM to hire some Quake hackers to do just this. Any takers? Apparently this idea has not died, maybe we can get some for us!
Last month I think Computer Graphics Magazine did a thing on 3D web stuff. Total example of someone who did not know or understand history and is doomed to repeat it.
This is another stupid idea that will die.
I had a friend that was in the private beta. I know it was beta and all, but it was a very poor AlphaWorlds clone when I saw it. It's hard to believe that in beta it wasn't even as good as that program, which predates it by 7 or more years.
Unless they radically improved it in recent months, I give them 6 months from release before they're closing the doors.
Not everyone did, at least at first. I was like 13 or 14 when the AOL 1.0 disk (a floppy) came to me out of the blue. I knew about the Internet, and I had even experienced it through a BBS-email gateway (FTP over email was ... interesting). The problem I was experiencing was this: while I could find magazines and books and other materials that taught me about the Internet, an actual dialup connection (we're talking pre-WWW here) was horrendously expensive where I lived in Oklahoma. IIRC, the materials that came with the AOL disk advertised some really good rates compared with the other local rates. Of course, they had neglected to install an access number in my LATA, so I never gave them any business. But I didn't begin to associate AOL with newbies for quite some time.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
I think the main point is that the real potential of a VR community has never been achieved because the businesses in this field are limiting their viewpoint.
One of my major issues with EverQuest, Dark Ages of Camelot, Quake, Deltaforce, and the like is that there is really no community outside of the fleeting interactions between people in the chat buffer.
To make a real community you need persistent history, culture and information that is available inside of the simulation. I have never seen this done - save for the message board in Everquest in 2 towns that noone ever uses (took me a long time to locate it too).
Why hasn't anyone done notepads (a simple text popup that you can type into, and open/save onto disk)? God knows I have spent a bundle of time and energy transcribing handwritten notes for my friends in these games. It is amazing to me.
I would really love to see pictures, documents, and hear music and sounds that players put into the world to share. THIS HAS NEVER BEEN DONE. Now, before you start balking at the storage issues, we can put limits on how much data they can keep on the servers; additionaly, if we are smart perhaps we build the ability to link media from external sources through the game world, so we wouldn't need to store it on the servers (maybe a hybrid of both would be the best approach).
Again, I have yet to see one real online VR community - and I think it has to do with the developers reach exceeding their grasp.
And run it on what? Happy feelings and rainbows pouring out of their asses? Or do you have a massive cluster with an incredibly fat connection that you've been looking for someone to use for free? I love free shit as much as anyone, but they have to pay some serious bucks to keep this thing running, not to mention try and recoup that huge initial investment.
;)
Their current ideas on financing the project seem to be pretty good, as you only pay for what you use, except for the bandwidth to go in and hang out. But that is their hook to get people in the first place, so it is probably best that they don't charge any sort of monthly fee. I imagine that it is going to take quite some time to fine-tune the system, but as long as most of the content is user created and auctioned to other users, they shouldn't have too many issues in that area, since it will be the users who dictate value for products and services. There Inc. collects the setup fee to implement new products and a small percentage of each transaction of those products, keeping the system running.
The only problems that I see are if they allow the world to stagnate rather than constantly updating the engine and providing new features in the APIs, and if they run out of funding before a sufficient user economy becomes established to support the project, since there won't be much going on for the first few months as they attract new users and the users get comfortable with creating new content and the idea of making micropayments for those products.
Given enough time, though, I see no reason why they cannot be successful, especially with scarcity well implemented into the system. After all, the MMOG maniacs buy and sell virtual items and cash by the digital truckload every day, and most of that stuff they could get for free with a bit of work in the game itself, as there is no scarcity except in the rare circumstance of an item spawn being discontinued. If hardware were free, then it wouldn't matter, but if they just allowed users to create and use giant multiple megabyte vehicles with a buttload of CPU-chowing options without cost, they'd be bankrupt in a matter of days.
To be honest, I don't expect much success from this project, being the pessimistic bastard that I am, but I do hope that I am wrong because I would love to see a Metaverse-style cyberspace actually be implemented. Then we'll just need the badass visual and audio devices for total immersion. Well, OK, and the groin devices as well, since pornography seems to be the spearhead of technological advancement.
Shawn
Because you gotta bitch
You're talking about a business model where millions of people pay an hourly rate to download ads from a misfeature-ridden ISP.
It's like a supertanker. At first glance it just defies the imagination. Even after you run the numbers, part of you refuses to believe it floats.
Once approved, you pay a one-time initial set up cost to start the process for your item. You can then either buy a quantity of the item or put one copy of the item up for perpetual auction. In addition to the set up charge, you pay the per-unit cost for each product you either buy or sell at auction.
"So what happens is, the bozos in the marketing and accounting departments say, oh that sounds good, doesn't that mean we only have to make one of them and then sell it an infinite number of times? Don't squint at me like that, Arthur, this is how accountants think!"
The first _and_ coolest online gaming system that launched back in 96 (yes I worked there, so I'm biased) several of the Mplayer people migrated over to There (no I'm not one of them, but might be if asked =) so these people have a LOT of experience in building and running a online gaming system.
Des
I'd mod your post up if I didn't already post in this thread. +1 Insightful. =)
-Berj
CNN Article
"I'm a karmawhore, and I'm okay.
I sleep all night and I work all day."
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Does anyone know if this VR world supports hardware acceleration? Every previous VR world with the exception of PC games works 100% on cpu rendering, and are in effect very slow. It looks laggy on a T1, because you're only getting only at most a dozen FPS IIRC. The best VR world I've seen so far would be a game, like Tribes 2 or something. Hardware acceleration and clean netcode will probably make/brake the VR universe that succeeds, if one succeeds in becoming halfway popular.
Just my $.02
This looks almost as cool as Muse technology.
Totally cool 3D multi-user online browser that supports almost EVERY media type including video on polys and integrated Web browsing...
So cool... and has been out there for some time!
In Soviet Russia, Metaverse launches YOU!
As Gertrude Stein once said about Oakland, CA:
"There's no there there."
Capitalize that last "there" and there ya go.
- Asparagirl
asparagirl at dca dot net
I see no real reason to spend my spare time building things for their APIs, if my work can only be run on their system - and their system is subject to their rate increases. I would think that a far better design would attempt to use a more peer to peer oriented system, or an open server that you can take and download. Of course, then you can't make money with it.. but at least it can't be arbitrarily censored, shut down, or rates hiked. Your expense is your machine and your connection, and the software packs. It would be really nice to see this under a opensource liscence though!
It might take off, it might not, but it's not a MMPOG like Everquest. In order to really want to spend a lot of time developing something, I'd think you'd want control over the system. Neverwinter Nights allows you to host your own games, on your own machine, and I think that kind of system is far better. I paid once for the game, and now I can use it until that I feel it's obsolete or I'm sick of it. Same thing with Quake, pay once, then you can decide when you'd had enough. Lots of incentive to mod things.
It's only a matter of time before somthing like that appears - a open source, or at least, one-time-fee based software product that you can run on your own network, then connect to other people via your own connections. If you want to use their database to have more people connected, fine, but making it a prerequisite limits the usefulness of the product. In a university community, or a wireless LAN, high bandwidth is a much more feasible option. Most DSL providers here have internal networks that run much faster than the connections through the gateways. All of those are arenas where games like these can take off. You'd be downloading avatars all night to keep up to pace on a crummy 56k modem.
I'm positive the open source community will do something here. The promise is too high.
On the other hand, I don't know.. it seems the older I get, the less interested I am. I'd rather work on my (real) cars and go (real) racing with (real) people.
*shrug* I'm not sure I have a point, oh well.
..don't panic
Letting other people create their own 3d models and art can be a very cheap way to make your world look better. Theres quite a few extraoridinarilly skilled and talented artists out there who make and skin 3D models that easily surpass the quality seen in your average computer game.
The problem is sometimes I'm not sure how much of the "mainstream" knows that they can download new player and gun models for their firstperson shooters, or hundreds of different models (a good portion of these are only mediocre) for the Sims. Worse yet, you can't add on at all for console games.
The most ironic thing of it all, is the majority of these people are doing it all for free. I suspect most of them want jobs in the hard-to-enter game industry, but some just do it as a hobby. There is one exception I know of, though not game-related. A program called Poser (3D app) which allows you to "pose", animate, and render highly realistic human and animal models. There is almost a subculture made up of people who make new textures and models for this program, and sell them from $5-$70.
In an age of warez and mp3s I wonder if it will ever be possible for freelance 3D artists to make a living producing aftermarket 3D models to use in free virtual worlds(a restricted environment would make this much more possible.) The question of would people pay has already been answered in a virtual world I used to frequent. Now artistic members of the community can place avatar custamization items they have made up for sale on a website, which tend to go for about $15-$30
The fundamental problem I have with the numerous attempts at building VR systems (aside from the fact that they are usually quite clunky and boring to use for anything besides basic chatting) is that these systems are almost universally based on large-scale central servers, rather than networks of small sites. Consider the model of the world wide web: anyone with a little bit of connectivity and bandwidth can host their own web site. Why shouldn't VR be the same way? Why do we chain ourselvers to monolithic, commercially controlled world servers rather than a community of interlinked VR rooms? The underlying technology has subtle social effects as well: would you rather have an autocratic dictatorship of a "planned" world or a democratic community where anyone can add their own pieces to the world?
The second problem (that has been noted by many people) is that 3DVR chatting has been done many, many times and is fairly uninteresting. To make this usefull, we need some big ideas about how we can bring existing applications into a 3D space and have them work more effectively, as well as completely new approaches which are only possible in an immersive environment. If VR is to be useful, it should be a ubiquitus application sitting in the background, one of many which helps you achive your tasks (work or play) rather than the elephant application that demands constant attention.
I have been leading my own free software project to build such a system: The Interreality Project and Virtual Object System (VOS). We have built a new protocol infrastructure to support distributed virtual objects (which are used to build virtual worlds) and a client program using the Crystal Space 3D engine. All of our software in available under the GPL or LGPL, and we are on our tenth public release (with a new release planned for the next couple weeks). The system has been in use at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst Laboratory for Perceptual Robotics for over a year, we have several outside developers, and there seems to be quite a bit of interest in our little project (the web site got 55,000 hits last month).
Our vision is a 3D companion to the web, but not in the (incredibly stupid) sense of putting 3D objects on web pages, but a highly interlinked ecosystem of small information resources -- which happen to convey information in 3D rather than mere 2D. Of course, multiuser support is also a fundamental part of this system -- if the world is dynamic, then any part can move and change and communicate, users, bots, agents and applicances. Perhaps the real key is that we must strive for a system that reflects the nature of the beast, the nature of the Internet, rather than trying to emulate the real world (badly).
The graphics are flash with a C++ client running it. And for further correction, I've been told that the Macromedia linux flash client has been released. (Yeah, I know this isn't fresh meat)
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
send resume
Can your IM do this?
I am still not clear as to package format, glibc version, kernel version, and c compiler version requirements for this, but I signed up for the beta anyway, since there isn't a gentoo ebuild for it yet.
Oh well, should be a matter of weeks, I am sure.
done =)
This is a very interesting project I wasn't aware of - too bad it can't get posted to the front page. Some people should submit it! Perhaps I'll eventually contribute.. it looks promising.
..don't panic
"we all laughed at AOL too."
And we will again! and again!
-kgj
There is something deeply, deeply wrong with spanking it to the rape of a crap-covered 13 year old schoolgirl buy a ninja octopus demon
Um, exactly which hentai flick is it that you are talking about? I am wanting to check it out for... research purposes.
Sometimes they even fear you. Could be my smooth, shaved head and red tinted glasses
They are all laughing at you. You think they fear you. They think your a fag. Asshat.
I can't see much positive from this project. I'm in favor of virtual worlds as a supplement to reality which let us experience something new, something otherwise unobtainable. But lets keep that in the world of fantasy, and not confuse it with reality, please.
doesn't mean their not wrong.
Sometimes they even fear you. Could be my smooth, shaved head and red tinted glasses, though. YMMV
Dude! I love your articles!
So what is the business model here? There might be some money to be made off of product placement (such as nike paying for the placement of their virtual goods) but product placement/advertizing has never solely been able to float an enterprize. Otherwise you could get into James Bond films for free. What is implied is that you pay real dollars for your There Dollars which you then use to buy particular virtual world stuff. In other words they plan on people giving them money in the absolutely purest expression of conspicuous consumption...Look at the money I must have in order to blow it on making my character look good.
That is an iffy proposition, particularly since in trim economic times it might be viewed not as cool but the ultimate in stupidity.
Now certainly, for example, there is a robust underground economy in selling EQ characters and items, but those have more than viaual utility in the game challenge and, despite the great publicity given it, would not generate enough net to pay for Verant's cost of maintaining the necessary servers and bandwidth and personnel to keep EQ running. There was another mmorpg, Project Entropia, that took the business model of giving the game away for free and selling the better stuff, but it has been mostly rejected by users and can only generously be considered a limited success.
Any snowcrash fans said this out loud?
:)
I wonder if its intentional
The main reason the most popular part of the metaverse was popular was because of something sound and text couldn't provide.
The Black Sun was a sucess because of the insanely detailed coding of facial expressions. See we are a species that naturally communicates on both a concious (specific string of words) and unconcious ('body language') level. IM and email only communicate on a concious level. Subsequently IM and email discussions often seem hollow or thin unless you know the person writing them and can accurately guess at their probable facial expressions, etc.
(time to make this ontopic)
Until substantial efforts in facial detail are put in, there won't be much mass acceptance of these types of systems.
The following is slightly offtopic, so feel free to ignore it.
This hints at the usefulness of emotes in MMOG's; it allows a certain level of body langauge for all those who have more friends online than "IRL". Similarly interesting is that many a-social MMOG players seem more comfortable communicating online. This could be because of a lack of sub-concious communication skills.. (of course this is all wild speculation)
Seems informative...
Sounds OK to me. So.... I was a contractor doing QA at There for a very brief period. I'd also been involved in a focus group for them prior to that.
Currently, I've been doing beta testing but my Windows box isn't up to spec, video card-wise. I think the vid card requirements are gonna kill them, unless they align with the folks that sell them and offer *massive* discounts. It was known over 16 months ago that these cards were required. I think that the "graceful degradation" solution should have been a priority.
Requiring IE for registration during the install and registration is just dumb. I haven't tried the second "private beta" yet but in the first Netscape, Moz or anything else on Windows just failed. It took a phone call and downloading IE to simply get registered. That's odd, because I remember a LOT of the folks (including QA) working in Linux, or at least using CLI stuff.
Lua is a nifty language, but requiring developers to learn something new is going to be a pain. I'd like to see (again) the API and SDK very soon.
There are some extremely talented people there. I wish I'd stayed. I wish I could go back, frankly. It wis a cool product, and visually and functionall stunning. And that was from a demo and testin 16 months ago. It has indeed gotten better since. I want the jet pack back. Hell with a hoverboard.
I wasn't too pleased with the internal alpha process (junior high kids) but it just might make it.
-jim
Isn't there the potential to have an interface where we make more of the "depth"/Z axis, maybe zooming in for more detail? Use a mousewheel for this maybe?
Heh, I must admit I was tempted too to say "Do you have the url?" - but in the end I was too polite..
On the hardware checker, only MacOS and Windows are listed. I chose other and typed in Red Hat Linux 8.0. Hopefully people who use other OS's typed those in, instead of closing the survey or choosing a Windows that they have on their 2nd partition :)
hmmm....lets see...laptop from work....Nvidia chipset.
Cheapie DELL (don't know about Gateway).....NVidia card....
I'm not sure I see the problem....
And since when did hardware accelerated OpenGL automatically mean NVidia anyway?
Advanced users are users too!
We all did not laugh at AoL. We laughed at the users.
AoL was around for a good time before it incarneted on the wired.
AoL is an access point for people who fear learning. Not all AoL users were dumb and not all dumb users used AoL it's the shear volume of stupidity.
The first ISP I ever signed up to made sure I was up to speed. The system admin called me to politely inform me my account was being terminated for responding to a massively crossposted trool.
Opps. My first mistake. They let me back on after a week and a new sign up fee.
AoL is designed for the newbie and thats good but that also means not punishing newbie mistakes and thats bad. A lot of users got the idea that thet weren't doing anything wrong.
I'm sure that system admin that called me got yelled at a lot but the user base was generally better off.
When it got sold the new staff left me cold so I don't use them anymore.
The lesson here is simple. Newbies are good thing. Not dropping bad users is a bad thing.
I don't actually exist.
a source of "side income" if you like being paid in Therebucks (read a little closer)
If I was a "fag", as you so eloquently put it, I would say that you need a hug.
Has anyone else noticed the increase in usage of the word "asshat" recently? I wonder if There would really filter out cussing and such things. The target audience certainly looks to be a "non-technical" group, which could include kids. The world does look sort of...innocent?
But I don't know, some of those expressions could be creepy.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
'nuff said
Could this be cross platform? I found this link while trying to do developer research. Here it is.
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
Check out http://www.ThereUniverse.com This is the first and soon to be the greatest unoffical fan site for the game There. The main feature of this site is a dedicated discussion forum to talk about the game. The decor is a work in progress... peace!
First fan site (discussion forum) for There.
I recognize this. This is the same angle that told us, 40 years ago, that television would rot the brains of the masses.
This is the same angle that told us, 20 years ago and yesterday, that video games are harmful to society.
It's not tru y'know. Except for the schizophrenics, people can tell the difference between reality and computer games and have no trouble at all adapting their behavior for each. If you want to know what's really, truly ugly, it's the doomsday predictions of navel gazers such as yourself.
He thought of Musashi, the Sword Saint, standing in his garden more than
three hundred years ago. "What is the 'Body of a rock'?" he was asked.
In answer, Musashi summoned a pupil of his and bid him kill himself by
slashing his abdomen with a knife. Just as the pupil was about to comply,
the Master stayed his hand, saying, "That is the 'Body of a rock'."
-- Eric Van Lustbader
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